The seventh annual Harvard Fall Tournament will be held on November 10, 2012. Like it was last year, it is on Veteran's Day weekend to give teams who are traveling some extra time between schooldays. As in the past the set will be house-written and I (Stephen Liu) will be serving as head editor.

Graham Moyer will serve as the tournament director, which means you should register with him by email at gmoyer01 @ college dot harvard dot edu. Please use "HFT Registration" as the subject header and indicate clearly how many teams you will be bringing. If you're not sure, give us a range and we'll make a note of it but you won't be guaranteed a spot in the field until you state a definite number.

The Set

We are planning to write 15 rounds, with the last two being special finals packets of slightly higher difficulty than the other 13. In the past we produced a 16-packet set, but as far as I know our 14th prelim packet was never read last year at any of the sites. We will write another packet if it appears later on that a 16th is required. Each packet will include the following:

Some people had issues with the perceived discrepancy between the stated and actual difficulties of our questions, so I'll try to state exactly what we are aiming for. This set will certainly be more difficult than novice sets and some questions will be more difficult than what one might expect from an HSAPQ or regular-difficulty house-written set. That said, the questions should be far easier than nationals-level. For tossups, we'll emphasize harder lead-ins and early clues over harder answer-lines, meaning you shouldn't worry about tossups on overly difficult topics. The bonuses will still be easy 10's and gettable 20's, and you should only notice a difference when you hear a slightly harder "hard" part. These differences serve to better differentiate very skilled teams while doing the best to maintain the same quality of playability for teams not quite at that level.

Since this is also what we were aiming for last year, the best set to look at to understand what I mean would be last year's HFT questions. We hope to use what we learned last year to make this year's questions hit even closer to the goals stated above. (Since quizbowlpackets.com has been in disuse, I'm not sure where you can find the set. It would be great if somebody could let me know what to do with it, since it hasn't shown up anywhere after I sent it to George six months ago.)

Lastly, we will put in extra effort to deliver a set with clean grammar, since that was an issue last year during the first use of HFT VI.

If you would like to mirror our set, send me an email at 7h3 dot white dot rabbit @ gmail dot com. We're especially looking for mirror sites in the Georgia area, the Kentucky/Ohio area, Southern California, Illinois, Texas, and the DC/MD/VA area. The mirror fee is $15 per team.

Tournament Format

We'll announce this as the field starts to shape up, but we can say now that we're aiming for a field of 36, mostly due to staffing/buzzer limitations. If you have experienced available staff, let us know! If you can bring buzzers, let us know!

Put Ridgewood down for 3 teams for now, though that may change. I will likely be able to come, but don't want to commit just yet. However, I can commit at least 10 buzzers if needed (and thank you for the loan from last year for MA NHBB, btw), and likely up to 20 if needed, so there's no reason this shouldn't be able to accommodate a minimum of 76 teams from at least a buzzer standpoint.

David MaddenRidgewood (NJ) '99, Princeton '03Founder and Director: International History Bee and Bowl, National History Bee and Bowl (High School Division), International History Olympiad, United States Geography Olympiad, US History Bee, US Academic Bee and Bowl, National Humanities Bee, National Science Bee, International Academic Bowl.Adviser and former head coach for Team USA at the International Geography Olympiad

As of right now, we've filled up our 36 team field. However, the field will probably be expanded by at least a few teams, so please keep sending registrations in! At they very least you'll be at the head of the waiting list.

It looks like we're going to have enough staff and buzzers (if Ridgewood can still bring a whole bunch of buzzers, that is) to expand the field, but I can only confirm that once we book more rooms. We'll keep you posted.

gyre and gimble wrote:It looks like we're going to have enough staff and buzzers (if Ridgewood can still bring a whole bunch of buzzers, that is) to expand the field, but I can only confirm that once we book more rooms. We'll keep you posted.

Yeah, we've got your buzzer back. Just let me know the # of systems you need. I can probably spare 6-10 systems that day, if you really need more, let me know, as I was thinking of placing an order for more soon anyway.

David MaddenRidgewood (NJ) '99, Princeton '03Founder and Director: International History Bee and Bowl, National History Bee and Bowl (High School Division), International History Olympiad, United States Geography Olympiad, US History Bee, US Academic Bee and Bowl, National Humanities Bee, National Science Bee, International Academic Bowl.Adviser and former head coach for Team USA at the International Geography Olympiad

gyre and gimble wrote:It looks like we're going to have enough staff and buzzers (if Ridgewood can still bring a whole bunch of buzzers, that is) to expand the field, but I can only confirm that once we book more rooms. We'll keep you posted.

Yeah, we've got your buzzer back. Just let me know the # of systems you need. I can probably spare 6-10 systems that day, if you really need more, let me know, as I was thinking of placing an order for more soon anyway.

I think we need 6 more to run the tournament but if you could bring 10 that would be great. We'd obviously give you discounts for all 10.

gyre and gimble wrote:It looks like we're going to have enough staff and buzzers (if Ridgewood can still bring a whole bunch of buzzers, that is) to expand the field, but I can only confirm that once we book more rooms. We'll keep you posted.

Yeah, we've got your buzzer back. Just let me know the # of systems you need. I can probably spare 6-10 systems that day, if you really need more, let me know, as I was thinking of placing an order for more soon anyway.

I think we need 6 more to run the tournament but if you could bring 10 that would be great. We'd obviously give you discounts for all 10.

Ok, so actually if you're only bringing 1 team then you'd just be playing for free, since your buzzer discount exceeds the base fee.

Though we thankfully have no reprisal of that Occupy nonsense, we're nevertheless split between the Quad and the Yard for HFT this year. It's about a 12 minute walk between those two areas, so like last year we'll break into playoffs at lunch. We'll be emailing coaches/whoever sent the registration email about where to go Saturday morning. This all worked out fairly smoothly last year so I hope it won't be much of a problem.

LASA A/B were tied for first place at the end of the tournament, but left to go to the symphony; I think they're planning on playing out a final at home. St. John's and Hunter both had two losses I believe (although I don't have the stats on me at the moment - confirm anybody?), and the other two teams in the top bracket of the super-playoffs were Dunbar and LASA C.

Sorry for the delay, but here are the super-playoff stats! We had to double check a couple of things but please let me know at kuokaichin@college.harvardSPAM.edu if there are things that still need to be fixed!

Thanks to everyone for a successful tournament! While this marks the second year in a row that our exciting finals packets went to waste (at least at our site), I was still happy to see multiple close, exciting matches between excellent teams. I hope everyone enjoyed the set, though there were quite a few errors which will be corrected before Dec. 1, our first mirror. If LASA wants to play off their tie for first, just shoot me an email and I can send along the Finals.

Just looking over the stats, I think we succeeded in making HFT accessible to lower-level teams, especially considering that about half of our field was probably not national-caliber. I like to think that this is because we made an effort to make 10's and 20's on bonuses more common than last year. The bonus conversions for the top teams don't appear to be objectionable, but I did get a slight feeling, especially in the superplayoffs, that people were feeling like they were getting too many gimme-30's. I'm not sure how prevalent that feeling was, but I did agree with them for quite a few of those bonuses. So I think next year we'll be aiming for slightly harder hard parts. Tossups-wise, we picked answers that we hoped everyone would at least have heard of, even if they'd only been playing quizbowl since September. Sometimes that wasn't the case but I was happy with tossup conversion even in the lower-level matches I read for. Regarding clues, the aim was to have pretty hard leadin and early-middle clues, but that tended to vary, especially with subjects I'm not as familiar with, which meant I wasn't able to edit the clues as well. For example, I can't remember a single buzzer race on history (in the first 3 lines), but there were buzzer races on science. That's something we'll work on for next year's set.

To sum up though, I think this was a pretty promising transition for HFT. Now that we've succeeded in improving accessibility, I think we'll focus more on getting rid of those buzzer races and further stratifying upper-level bonus conversion. Thanks again to all and we hope to see you back again next year!